Section 5

5. So we come to the scope of the purification: that understood,
the nature of Likeness becomes clear. Likeness to what Principle?
Identity with what God?

The question is substantially this: how far does purification
dispel the two orders of passion- anger, desire and the like, with
grief and its kin- and in what degree the disengagement from the
body is possible.

Disengagement means simply that the soul withdraws to its own
place.

It will hold itself above all passions and affections. Necessary
pleasures and all the activity of the senses it will employ only for
medicament and assuagement lest its work be impeded. Pain it may
combat, but, failing the cure, it will bear meekly and ease it by
refusing assent to it. All passionate action it will check: the
suppression will be complete if that be possible, but at worst the
Soul will never itself take fire but will keep the involuntary and
uncontrolled outside its precincts and rare and weak at
that. The Soul
has nothing to dread, though no doubt the involuntary has some power
here too: fear therefore must cease, except so far as it is purely
monitory. What desire there may be can never be for the
vile; even the
food and drink necessary for restoration will lie outside of the
Soul's attention, and not less the sexual appetite: or if such
desire there must be, it will turn upon the actual needs of
the nature
and be entirely under control; or if any uncontrolled motion takes
place, it will reach no further than the imagination, be no more
than a fleeting fancy.

The Soul itself will be inviolately free and will be working to
set the irrational part of the nature above all attack, or
if that may
not be, then at least to preserve it from violent assault,
so that any
wound it takes may be slight and be healed at once by virtue of the
Soul's presence, just as a man living next door to a Sage
would profit
by the neighbourhood, either in becoming wise and good
himself or, for
sheer shame, never venturing any act which the nobler mind would
disapprove.

There will be no battling in the Soul: the mere intervention of
Reason is enough: the lower nature will stand in such awe of Reason
that for any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and
censure its own weakness, in not having kept low and still in the
presence of its lord.